'Nature-al’ Entrepreneurship: Being Green Without the State | Timothy Terrell

This is a transcript, edited for clarity, of a talk by professor Timothy Terrell at the Mises Insistute conference in Oklahoma just last week.

He argues if you want to go green, you should do so without the state’s coercion, explaining how entrepreneurs and property rights can protect forests, wildlife, and open spaces better than bureaucracies, using real-world examples of “enviropreneurs”....

'Nature-al’ Entrepreneurship: Being Green Without the State

by Timothy Terrell

I subtitled my talk being green without the state, but I'm not trying to put some sort of free-market twist on a lecture about how you need to use an electric lawn mower or recycle or something like that. I'm in fact going to try to avoid pushing my preferences about uses of the environment altogether. That's not really my point here. 

People have different ideas about what is good and about what is useful. And I like the many useful things that we can make with the resources we extract from the environment. 

Many people like me also enjoy wilderness land and views of wildlife. I like forests and rivers. I like knowing that some species of antalope or rhinoceros are still with us, even if I'm not actually going out and looking at it myself. 

What I want to do is show that entrepreneurship is compatible with those goals. 

Entrepreneurship and the environment

An entrepreneur is a person who anticipates a future consumer demand and tries to adjust the factors of production to accomplish that, for the consumer, in search of a profit. For many people, this seems just diametrically opposed to the idea of solving problems related to the use of the environment. I'm going to suggest it's not only not incompatible, that it's essential that we think of things this way. 

We tend to think of entrepreneurship as being separate from the natural world, or at least just making goods that require extracting some substances from the world and then manipulating them into some product. What I'd like to do here is make the case that entrepreneurs can do this with nature as well, creating goods in a sense that have nature in its natural state, or at least something close to it. 

Environmental resources have value that is determined by the goals of the customers. The entrepreneur must satisfy those customers to earn a profit. So we say that environmental value is imputed -- that is to say that the value of the resource in the environment is derived from the value of the product that's made from that resource. 

An environmentalist of the anti-capitalistic type however, which is a very common type, might protest. Um, wouldn't we say that elements of the environment have some sort of value apart from whether they can be turned into a toaster or turned into a fur coat? And uh, you know, they might say, well, do we have to make everything uh into some kind of raw material for a factory? And I would say, well, certainly not. We have to think more broadly about what customers really want. 

Entrepreneurs respond not only to people who want goods that are manufactured out of the environment. They respond to people who value the natural world as more than just a source of calories, minerals, or fibre. 

Many people want goods and services that are the products of factories. We all do that to some extent, but we also value goods and services that are best provided by an environment in its natural state. So, people want the same kinds of things I want when I head out to the wilderness, as I like to do and don't get to do as much as I'd like. 

Maybe some people just want the knowledge that there is a place where land and wildlife exist without human contact. Even if that means we're not necessarily going to go and visit that place. Many of us just like knowing that there is such a place and providing those things is not outside the realm of entrepreneurship. 

Value? Whose value?

But I think we need to clear up something first. Some environmentalists want to separate the idea of value from a valuer. And I think that's a that's a serious problem. 

They're arguing for a kind of an inherent value in nature, but they run up against this insurmountable difficulty: How do we decide what this inherent value is to compare it to the value of other things? And we can't really. 

An individual who's demanding that other people recognise a certain value is often simply a demand that other people accept the authority of that person to say what the value is.

So, an individual can say authoritatively for him that a tree is worth more than a chair from that tree. Or even say that all the manufactured goods in the world are worth more or to less to him than that single tree. You can do that. You can make that statement if you like. But that person could not authoritatively say for everyone for all time that a tree is inherently worth more or less than a chair. 

You may value for yourself a particular tree rather than having a chair from that tree. Nobody would be able to say otherwise. But getting into questions of whether we should value a chair more than a tree or value a tree more than a chair is to inject morality into the discussion. Now I'm certainly not opposed to having that kind of conversation, but I think we should be aware of what's happening there that that is that is a religious conversation. And I think environmentalist religious values should be seen for what they are and we should deal with them on that level. 

When individuals choose one alternative from among many alternatives, they are stating their values – revealing their preferences, if you like -- and they're indicating that in a way that is convincing. 

If I choose to eat a hamburger instead of a salad, I'm showing my own preferences in a in a pretty strong way. it's reliable. And when people choose a chair over a tree or vice versa, that is also reliable evidence. 

And an entrepreneur may forecast that people may want chairs in the future instead of trees. And they may then try to acquire the inputs into production to create that production process to create chairs out of trees. That entrepreneur has to obtain um command of those resources. They have to either buy or rent the resources. They have to hire the labour to produce those those things. And we then see that movement from chair from trees to chairs instead of the trees continuing in whatever their alternative use was. 

Normally the chair manufacturer, the entrepreneur, is going to do this by persuading people, maybe by paying them, but certainly donations are not out of the question in order to get that kind of product to the final consumer. 

If that entrepreneur is correct in his forecast, then he makes a profit. If he is incorrect in his forecast, there will be a loss. And Mises wrote that profit and loss “are generated by success or failure in adjusting the course of production activities to the most urgent demand of the consumers.” 

Now those protesters who would prefer that trees remain as trees instead of being turned into chairs do have a clear pathway to get what they want without coercion. They may engage in nature entrepreneurship or as some at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) have called it: enviropreneurship. These enviropreneurs can produce another kind of good. They can produce a good called trees in their natural state or something of that sort. 

In order to do that, these individuals would have to gain ownership or control over these trees by paying for them, leasing them entrusting them,or simply by getting people to donate the forest to them just as the chairmaking entrepreneur would have to do. So whether as a for-profit or legally a not-for-profit entity, that nature enterprise would then be imputing value to those trees. In that way it is pushing back against the use of trees for chairs. 

the tree lovers and the chair lovers are then engaging in a kind of a peaceful market process that works out how many trees are allocated to each group. 

So, when a market is allowed to work freely, it is um a process of each person who wants to extract a natural resource, or to leave that resource in its place, comparing his own valuation of that resource to that of others. 

Examples: How do you fight ‘Big Chair’?

So let's suppose we have a thousand-acre plot of forested land that's up for sale. The person who wants to use that land for a forest preserve would have to compare how much do I value this compared to what its alternative use is. And they would have to be able and willing to offer as much for that land as the next highest bidder. 

Whether that highest bidder or next highest bidder is someone who wants to cut the trees down and make chairs out of them -- or maybe to discourage the growth of further trees in order to have some kind of antelope preserve. 

So, how can a bunch of tree huggers possibly compete with a profit- seeking enterprise? How do they fight ‘Big Chair’? 

For some people it may seem that government coercion is the only answer to this. But I think private nature entrepreneurs may realize economic value in several ways and make their enterprise work out financially. 

They could sell visits to the nature preserve. We could maybe call this ecotourism. 

They could also harvest resources from the preserve in a way that is not is not incompatible with using it as a as a nature preserve. I'm reminded of a episode in which the Audobon Society sold natural gas rights to a bird preserve that they had acquired in Louisiana. They were of course very careful about how that was to be done, but they did lease out those gas reserves while maintaining the land for the benefit of birds as well. So there are ways to do that. 

Also you could sell merch -- branded merchandise. My wife has a sweatshirt that says American Prairie Reserve on it and it's advertising for donations essentially for that organisation. 

We can come up with a lot of and don't have to you know make up examples. We can think of actual examples of cases where this kind of thing has been done. 

There's a group called the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership which uses donations to create or enhance wildlife habitat. One of the things they do is a programme called the Bird Returns Programme where they pay California farmers to flood rice fields after the harvest to provide migratory birds with attractive landing spots along the Pacific flyway. And the farmers participate in a sort-of reverse auction where they say, "Okay, this is how much money it would take me to convince me to keep my land flooded um after the harvest." And the organisation goes through these bids and says, "Okay, which ones? how much land can we get for the cheapest?” and they then pay these farmers to keep their lands flooded um and provide habitat for these birds. 

This whole thing relies on data from an volunteers who contribute to something called an e-Bird app about sightings of various birds. 

I found out, by the way on my trip from the airport [to this conference] that Oklahomans really like birds. They have them on a lot of the license plates. Scissor tail I think. Uh so in in Montana [where I live], another group that I already mentioned, the American Prairie Reserve has assembled a patchwork of private land to preserve prairie and its natural state. They use donated funds for this. 

They want to eventually connect 3.2 million acres of prairie. They make campsites available with low-impact facilities. My wife and I reserved one of these last year on a trip through Montana. 

One of the things they do is a bison conservation programme. They manage bison. Their objective is to have a herd of some 5,000 bison around Yellowstone National Park. 

And in central Idaho, wolf lovers created a trust fund to compensate ranchers for livestock that were lost to wolves. And the idea there was to reduce the objections, which are understandable, that ranchers might have to reintroducing wolves into the wild.

And a few years later, the same individuals did the same kind of thing for grizzly bears. 

In Vermont, the Audabon Society has created a ‘Produced in Bird-Friendly Habitats’ label for maple-syrup producers to use in exchange for enhancing bird habitat in their maple tree forests. 

The same organisation, the Audabon Society, succeeded in New Mexico in gaining property rights over instream water which was beneficial for birds -- and a group called Trout Unlimited did the same thing for trout preservation purposes. 

Last year I gave a talk at a Mises event in Florida, where I mentioned the NA Nature Conservancy's Sycan Marsh Preserve in Oregon which was managed so well that when a raging fire on neighbouring government land approached their preserve, it was noticeably diminished in intensity down to a kind of a manageable ground fire because they had actually managed their land well as opposed to the government which had had not. 

Hunt them, skin them, save them

Another example. There are private ranches in Texas who imported and bred Aurochs], Addax Antelope and Dama Gazelles. And they started this even before the Endangered Species Act was created. They obtained revenue by allowing hunters to come on the land and hunt these species. 

Of course, they had an incentive to not let these species be over hunted. That was a source of revenue for them. And as of 2024, there were about 12,000 scimitar-horned Aurochs and 5,000 Addax on these ranches, and somewhere between about 1,000 and,500 Dama Gazelle. The Aurochs actually went extinct in their native habitat in Africa and so these Texas Aurochs provided the seed stock for reintroducing the Aurochs in their natural habitat. This is because of entrepreneurs doing this on their own initiative. 

Since only about 250 to 300 Dama Gazelle are left in their native habitat in in North Africa, these private ranches might actually help to bring that species back into its into its natural habitat as well. 

And there's a lot of other examples of this kind of environmental entrepreneurship. There are countless conservation and habitat preservation efforts by private land owners that don't get noticed because nobody knows about them. They're maybe just an individual or a family, not a national organisation. But there's a lot of this kind of thing going on, even if it’s some farmer that's maintaining a little bit of acreage for a bird habitat. 

Unintentional Enviropreneurship

There's also a kind of unintentional green entrepreneurship that comes from entrepreneurs trying to reduce their use of scarce resources in order to cut costs. You know, you go way back and find, you know, the discovery of how to make kerosene out of petroleum, which provided a useful and inexpensive alternative to whale oil -- with corresponding eventual benefits for whale populations.

Or innovations in fish farming, which meant that you can produce fish at low cost and reduce pressure on fish populations in the open ocean where private property rights have been imperfectly established -- or even forbidden by governments. 

Producing crop breeds with more output per acre means that land can be reconverted to forest land. We've actually seen this happen in Europe where forests have been expanding, and I think also in the United States. Certainly since the 1930s we've got more forests than we did at that time. 

Green tech & government

So what function does this leave for government? 

Can government be a nature entrepreneur? 

Some people will say that government must make some kind of investment in, say, green technology or some other kind of innovation, promotion, or maybe take ownership of land. 

I was just talking at my table with some people about um the grabs for land by the Federal Government under Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency and some others, and I've talked here before about some of the problems of government land management. 

Here I want to think more about the green technology side of things. Part of the work of the entrepreneur is trying to decide how to use technology and capital, and we see government inserting itself into these kinds of decisions. 

When I worked for the Soil Conservation Service, which iss now renamed, but as part of the Department of Agriculture we provided technical assistance to farmers. And we would often kind of joke to ourselves about Ronald Reagan's comment about the nine most terrifying words in the English language” “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” 

And that was an appropriate concern. That agency had actually been instrumental in promoting kudzu vine -- sometimes called “the vine that ate the south” -- a weed that was introduced by the Soil Conservatgion Service for soil erosion control but has proved very difficult to control, and now covers arond 7 million acres in the southeastern United States.

So do we need the government to fund the development of or adoption of a new agricultural technique or energy-efficient technology? 

Some people believe it would be very helpful for government to promote this kind of thing, a new energy source and new energy production technology. Maybe it's not competitive now, they say, but if you just get government to provide the seed money then eventually it would be. This is the kind of argument you will hear.

I would say it's impossible for these kinds of decisions to be carried out successfully by a government bureaucracy. Mises showed why over a hundred years ago in a famous 1920 essay on the socialist calculation problem and then more fully in his book Socialism. Without an unhampered market process, he explained, there is no way for a government to determine whether a conventional method or some new technology is best suited to the satisfaction of the customer. And there's several reasons for this. 

First, there's a limited willingness of people to exchange goods now for goods later. This is the concept of time preference. 

Government can simply coerce funds from people. It can force people to accept a greater loss in the present in order to get a speculative gain of some kind in the future. A potential return that is really so small that people wouldn't really want to accept this if given the choice. 

And some people might say, well, you know, people are simply too dull-minded to appreciate these later gains and they have to be forced into accepting this kind of investment for their own good. You know, we're going to take your tax dollars and we're going to invest in these solar panels and you'll be glad that we did this later. And if you're not glad, it's just proof that you're not as smart as we are. Or maybe you're just a bad person. We know what's good for you because we're the experts. So trust us. 

But why should we expect government using other people's money to have a clearer picture of present costs and future benefits? There's really no way for them to do this. 

For the sake of time I’ll not comment on the competition for taxpayer dollars which I think some of the other talks have mentioned -- the lobbying that goes on where elected officials are constantly accepting bids for changing regulation. 

I'll mention one example of government steering innovation in a way that is comically absurd. In the 1950s, and this is from an article by Benjamin Powell, a group in Japan called the Ministry for International Trade and Industry or MITI tried to steer Japan's industrial investment. They tried to prevent a small firm from acquiring manufacturing rights to produce semiconductors. The firm persisted and was eventually allowed to acquire the technology. That firm went on to become a highly successful consumer electronics company, Sony. 

The same Ministry also attempted to prevent firms in the Japanese auto industry from entering the export market, and tried to force 10 firms in the industry to merge into two, Nissan and Toyota. These attempts failed and the automobile manufacturing went on to become one of Japan's most successful industries. 

Some of you may remember a more recent example involving a solar panel manufacturing firm named Solyndra which was the largest recipient at one time of Department of Energy funds. They got a $535 million loan guarantee and only about a year and a half after that guarantee they were in very serious trouble: laying off workers, shutting down one of their two facilities. And this is I thought interesting that they delayed their announcement of their layoffs and their plant shutdown until the day after the midterm elections in 2010. Under obvious pressure from the Department of Energy, taxpayers ended up losing about $528 million when the firm went bankrupt in 2011. 

Private investments also experience failure, but we should expect the severity of failures in an unhampered market to be reduced, since private investors have the advantage of better information.  

I'll just close by saying that that I think it's better far better for all of us to preserve the freedom of entrepreneurs to do what they do best. 

They far more faithfully than government will serve the interests of their customers and that includes customers who are concerned with environmental benefits. That includes the customers who are interested in chairs and toaster ovens and houses, as well as the customers who want forests and prairie and gazelles. 

Thanks very much.  

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Timothy Terrell is T.B. Stackhouse Professor of Economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he has taught since 2000. He earned his PhD in economics from Auburn University in 1998. Dr. Terrell is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, where he works on the editorial staffs of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. He is also the Böhm-Bawerk Visting Research Fellow for Spring 2026. Dr. Terrell’s research focuses on regulatory and environmental policy issues.